Of the five nominees, this is the novel I have read (completely) most recently. I finished it a little under a week ago, but have been waiting a bit to give the novel time to percolate before I review it.
Throne of the Crescent Moon is Saladin Ahmed's first published novel, though he has had multiple shorter works published, and overall I thought it was very polished for a debut novel, though in a couple of places I thought it could have used a touch of improvement -- mostly in POV clarity. I recall two or three times when I got confused about exactly who the POV is, which isn't exactly good in a strict 3rd-person limited story. At least one of those I can blame on the book's layout, as what appears to have been a space break in a chapter happened to fall at the end of a page and was lost to the margins, but others happened as well. Every time I got confused I went back and reviewed the section and realized that it was still in a particular person's POV, but not so firmly that it was unambiguous to me without double-checking. In particular, I think that a couple times started by mentioning the POV character's names and one thought on what was happening, followed by paragraphs of other people's actions and reactions -- oftentimes, one main actor, who I would start to think was the POV character, until a thought was presented from the original POV character once more. My takeaway from this is to always make sure I have the POV character firmly established, and possibly default to too much reminder rather than too little, even if occasionally I need to wedge a reference to the POV character in among other character's actions.
There is also common advice to limit the POV characters, especially as beginning authors writing a novel, and that might have helped here as well. I believe there were at least 5 POVs -- 6, counting the guard's POV in the prologue -- and I'm not convinced that we were always, to use the often-given advice, following the POV of the character who was in the most pain. (Of course, there are other valid reasons to choose a POV character, one of which is to remind the reader of that POV's plot thread, but since this book followed one main plot thread from multiple POVs, that doesn't apply as strongly here.)
So far as the plot goes, it was very externally-heavy in conflict, or at least in progress during the conflicts. Each main character seems to have been given one (1) internal conflict to deal with, or possibly 2 for some of them if you count "I'm getting too old for this" to be an internal conflict. Most of the internal conflicts were introduced and stayed constant until the end, after the external conflict was resolved, whereas the external one had them doing the try-fail cycles. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and so far as I understand it is more of the norm for the sword-and-sourcery subgenre, but it still makes for a work that is less engaging to me. I want the characters run through an internal-conflict mangler as well as the external-conflict one.
Overall, it was a fun, fairly quick read, with a handful of problems I can hopefully take and learn something from. I wouldn't rank it the best story I've read that was published last year, but it was by no means a bad story either, and not disappointing as a Hugo nominee.
Current ballot rankings:
1) Redshirts
2) Throne
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